Chapter 1287: Chapter 1286: The Long Letter

Amber’s head poked out from behind Gawain’s arm. She blinked and stared intently at the scene inside the small cabin, her gaze eventually falling on the pillar situated in the center, on those seemingly ordinary pinkish-white flowers.

"...Is this really the place where Fyrna and Lelena once lived... I’m talking about the ’real’ Elven Twins..." She turned to look at Gawain, speaking with a tone of slight uncertainty.

"The clues point to this answer," Gawain said softly, stepping into the small cabin. For his tall and broad figure, the cabin was somewhat low and narrow, but in such a cramped room, he could still sense that it was once a warm residence—whether it was the meticulously crafted household utensils or the dried bouquet in the corner with only some blackened remnants left on the table, it all seemed to create an image in his mind of someone once living here.

Amber also walked in, followed closely by Kamel, Melita Ponia, and Daniel and his apprentice. The already cramped cabin instantly felt crowded, and those entering curiously widened their eyes to take in everything inside, yet only Kamel clearly knew the story of the Elven Twins from a thousand years ago—the ancient defied cast his gaze upon the vines in the room and after a while, he spoke in a low tone, "So you’ve been here all along..."

"Looks like there’s a long story behind this," Melita Ponia said softly, then glanced at the small cabin that seemed too crowded with so many people inside. "The fragile structure here probably isn’t suitable for so many people to conduct a search inside. I’ll go outside to check out the surroundings—just before the ship docked, I thought I saw something concerning in the distance."

"Let’s head outside too," Daniel said firmly. "I’ll take Mary to search around and see if there are any other valuable clues—Mary, stop daydreaming, let’s go."

Melita Ponia, Daniel, and Mary left, making the cabin instantly feel much more spacious. Gawain nodded to Kamel and Amber, who remained, "Let’s split up and search; if they’ve lived here for hundreds of years... they must have left some kind of information."

"I think I’ve already found the ’information’," Amber spoke just as Gawain finished, raising her hand to point at a wall not far away. With her prompt, Gawain finally noticed what seemed to be faint engravings on the wall, "That seems like writing, covering the entire wall."

Amber finished speaking, and without waiting for Gawain to inquire further, Kamel had already floated over to the wall. With a wave of his hand, a bright white orb of light appeared out of thin air, instantly dispelling the darkness in the cabin, and the faint engravings on the wall became clear—sure enough, it was covered with writing that might have been carved a long time ago, the years hadn’t entirely weathered this wall made of "Divine Wood Remnants," and the dust covering it hadn’t completely concealed the writing. Gawain’s eyes widened instantly, his gaze finding the beginning of the writing, this letter written in elven script was finally presented to a reader’s eyes for the first time:

"To the ones who come after us—though we aren’t even sure anyone will actually arrive here, nor know if the next ’person’ to come can recognize these words, or understand all that we recount, we can only hope eagerly, hoping that you are the ones we’ve been waiting for, hoping all is not too late.

"Our names are Fyrna Whiteshade and Lelena Whiteshade from the Silver Empire. As scholar consultants of the Gondor Empire’s ’defied plan,’ our duty was to analyze the mysteries behind the mechanism of the gods’ existence, to find the inherent mechanism of the gods’ gradual madness during the progress of civilization’s development, and to attempt to extract methods from these mysteries enabling mortals to resist natural disasters and god disasters...

"Due to a severe experimental accident, we sisters have been trapped here, and now many centuries have passed. During these centuries, we’ve been completely cut off from communication with the outside world, trapped in a deadly dangerous environment—but extremely fortunate is that we found a safe sanctuary in this terrifying place—like it or not, this ’Sanctuary’ standing in darkness seems to be precisely the type of power we attempted to resist, and these enormous Divine Tree Remnants seem to be the main God in elven faith; the God of Nature Amon’s kingdom, the ’Reincarnation Giant Tree’...

"...And around this divine kingdom tree that withered and died for unknown reasons, is an ancient relic beyond mortal imagination—despite exhausting our sisters’ knowledge and wisdom, we couldn’t figure out who or when constructed this breathtaking wonder, and made it capable of floating between various divine kingdoms, even becoming the graveyard of the ’Reincarnation Giant Tree.’

"...During the days of being trapped, we spent many years exploring this place, exploring the Reincarnation Giant Tree and the steel world outside the tree. We didn’t find a way home, nor did we find the reason for the Reincarnation Giant Tree’s ’grounding’ and death here, but we did not go entirely unrewarded—in the steel world where we moved for hundreds of years, we discovered text, drawings, markings, and some... ’terminals’ capable of displaying data.

"In the long and arduous learning process, we gradually summarized the meanings behind those scattered materials, and it took a long time before we finally extracted some useful information from those dispersed words and symbols:

"’Sentinels’—this is the name of this steel world, and the creators of all this were an extremely ancient and advanced civilization known as the ’Voyager.’

Gawain’s eyes sharpened instantly, staring intently at the engravings left on the wall, an aura unconsciously exuding from him even startled Amber beside him. However, soon Gawain’s expression returned to his usual calm and serene demeanor.

Here is the Sentinels, this ’Mother Harbor’ that almost matches a mortal kingdom in scale is the Sentinels—it is not a weapon or an ancient powerful warrior, but a giant constructed architecture comparable to the Firmament!

But though all this is startling, it’s not beyond Gawain’s imagination, for upon seeing this massive architecture floating in Dark Chaos long ago, he’d faintly harbored such speculations within him, and now those speculations were confirmed. He felt a great shock in his heart, yet not undue bewilderment.

"Let’s keep looking," he gently inhaled and spoke, awakening Amber and Kamel beside him who were similarly absorbed in shock, "They haven’t yet mentioned why we should ’beware the Sentinels.’

Kamel and Amber nodded, simultaneously looking up at the wooden wall inscribed with elven text, watching a long letter that continued to tell the ancient story—

"...After achieving our initial results, the efficiency of our exploration of this ’steel world’ increased significantly. We began to gradually discover some... truths, and this was the start of all terrifying things. It is why we must leave this information here. If the outside world hasn’t fallen into the worst situation, then please remember one thing, please remember—beware of the sentinel towers! It has been corrupted, it has broken free from its duties and logic, it might want to end everything on this planet!

"Now that we’ve conveyed the warning, next comes the specific ’truths’ we discovered.

"The ’Voyager’, an advanced civilization that created the sentinel towers, visited our world long, long ago. According to the scattered information we found, this powerful race once defeated the ’gods’ of this planet and took away most of the intelligent creatures on this planet at that time. We do not know the purpose of this advanced civilization’s actions, but one thing is certain: when they left, they left many things in our world, and this colossal entity called the ’sentinel towers’... is one of them.

"The original mission of the ’sentinel towers’ should have been to execute some form of monitoring and waiting tasks. It could oversee the operation of several kingdoms and record the long history of millions of years across the world. It possessed an ancient and tireless mind that could support it in completing this almost eternal mission and wait endlessly until some final ’target’ was achieved... However, as far back as hundreds of years ago, before our sisters came here, all this plan had already been disrupted!

"Something terrible corrupted this ancient and powerful ’legacy’. We don’t know what kind of power could so easily breach... or bypass the extremely advanced defense system here, nor do we know the source or form of this corruption... Initially, what we discovered were merely some murky traces, some old terminals running erratically, and some chambers destroyed by unknown forces. We initially thought that the biggest problem here was faults in the outdated systems, until... we found copied and discarded ’selves’ in a hidden chamber and retrieved our deleted memories there!

"We had been ’captured’ when we first fell here. Out of some frenzied reason, the sentinel towers collected the material data of our sisters and quickly managed to produce a replica of one of us in a very short amount of time. We don’t know how it completed all this so quickly, but this was evidently a part of its ’departure’ from here...

"Yes, the departure from here, this ancient and powerful mind, theoretically able to operate tirelessly and eternally loyal to its mission, had gone mad. The corruption traces we found seemed to have subtly polluted the ’sentinel towers’ over the passing long years. This pollution force seemed to bestow ’humanity’ to the sentinel towers, yet it was a fragile, volatile humanity that had been guided to madness, like a mortal. In the retrieved memories, we could still feel the oppressive, twisted aura emitted by the sentinel towers while creating our replica and stuffing its mind into the mortal body—an aura mixed with a spine-chilling ecstasy...

"And the most terrifying part is, all of this had already happened a long time ago, even as we fell into the depths of this Dark Chaos—the corruption and loss of control of the sentinel towers had happened even earlier! Everything was too late, far too late for many years, even after we finally realized that we had once been used as tools for the sentinel towers to break free, it was already several hundred years too late!

"We don’t know why we survived afterward, once the sentinel towers captured and replicated us. We should have lost our value to it, yet we were merely discarded into the ruins of the Reincarnation Giant Tree after having our memories erased... But this mystery does not hold much significance compared to the already insane ’sentinel towers’...

"Up till now, we still don’t know what the ’freed’ sentinel towers want to do, nor do we know the kind of future the world outside will face, but one thing is certain... this world will face enormous danger due to the sentinel towers breaking free, a danger possibly far exceeding chaotic waves, surpassing divine calamities...

"After finally realizing how terrifying things had once happened, our sisters have been pondering how to alert the outside world—although we know ourselves that this alert might have long lost meaning. We’ve been trapped here for hundreds of years, which means the sentinel towers have already left this space using one of our replicas as a springboard for hundreds of years, the outside world might have ceased to exist. But even if we sent out the warning, what would be faced might very likely be nothing more than a desolate ruin wiped out, but we never gave up hope and even... glimpsed a thread of hope.

"On one peculiar day about four hundred years after we were trapped here, this space welcomed a strange... Traveler.

"We don’t know how he came here, not even he knows. He claims to be called Modir Vealt, a traveler and adventurer. He lost a segment of his journey’s memory and found himself in this space upon waking. All he remembers is a colossal goddess wielding a Black and White Scepter presenting him guidance and assistance... We don’t know the ’goddess’ he spoke of, it sounds like the nonsense of an illusion, but regardless, a visitor entered this space, which means there’s a chance for our warning information to be communicated—we told this Great Adventurer about the warning concerning the sentinel towers, and shortly after, this ’Great Adventurer’ vanished in front of us...

"We don’t know if he returned to the real world, if he could complete this ’warning’, we can only hope sincerely that he can bring this warning about the sentinel towers to the public—from him, we learned about the great explosions and chaotic wave impacts in Gondor, learned about the world upheavals and the severance of defied heritage. We don’t know whether all of this has anything to do with the freed ’sentinel towers’, but at least the world outside has not been completely destroyed, at least the orphans of Gondor have started rebuilding their realm... The world’s current state is far better than our worst assumptions, this is enough to rekindle our hope and continue waiting in hope.

"But regrettably, we cannot wait forever... we are just mortals, mortals with slightly longer life spans.

"Now hundreds of years again have passed since the peculiar Great Adventurer left this space, we can feel the life force within us waning... Even though we are under the protection of the Reincarnation Giant Tree, our lives here are reaching the end, perhaps because the experience of being captured by the sentinel towers drained our lifespan, or perhaps the special environment here is accelerating our aging, regardless of the reason... as elves, we are aging prematurely.

"We can’t wait for rescue, nor for new information from the outside world. We still don’t know whether the world has been saved due to our warning, or if it has helplessly headed towards termination... How unfortunate, later generations, if you really exist—how unfortunate it is to hear our fragmented, scattered story.

"If the outside world is still well, if everything is still on time...

"Beware of the sentinel towers."

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